A Legal Bank Robbery

At first nobody noticed how much had disappeared because heists in high places occur without ski masks or guns. But now the House Banking Committee, the thousands of duped bondholders and the public have caught on: to the empty vault at California's Lincoln Savings and Loan, to the perfidy of its owner Charles Keating and to the complicity of the Government. Says Banking Committee member Jim Leach of Iowa: "Keating is at fault because he is a bank robber, but we in Washington made it, in part, a legal bank robbery."

Keating, the Phoenix businessman who is accused of using Lincoln as a private casino, is emblematic of the nation's $300 billion-plus S & L disaster. But he has no dearth of accomplices. There are the so-called Keating Five -- Senators Dennis DeConcini and John McCain of Arizona, John Glenn of Ohio, Donald Riegle of Michigan and Alan Cranston of California -- who received $1.3 million in contributions from Keating and went to bat for him against federal regulators. The five sank deeper into trouble last week when the Senate ethics committee appointed outside counsel to investigate. The FBI also expanded its Keating probe to include questions about the Senators' involvement.

Riegle, meanwhile, had to confess to several meetings with Keating that he forgot to tell the Senate ethics committee about until it came out in congressional testimony. One was a helicopter tour of Keating's real estate empire in 1987. Cranston's political future darkened during congressional hearings last week when some of his California constituents blamed "Cranston's corruption" for the loss of their savings.

Last week the spotlight also fell on M. Danny Wall, picked by the White House in July 1987 to replace Edwin Gray as chairman of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board. Gray, a onetime captive of the savings and loan industry, lost his job when he began to speak out about the extent of the S & L fraud.

In 1988 Wall removed the Lincoln investigation from the bank board's San Francisco office to Washington, postponing the closing of the savings and loan by two years. That delay will add $1.3 billion to the taxpayers' cost of repaying depositors and unloading Lincoln's washed-out investments. "My responsibility was to see that this was not a lynch mob after Keating," Wall explained to TIME last week. "The San Francisco office has a history of being hysterical, overzealous, swept away by smoke where there is no gun." Yet ; Wall's Washington audit eventually confirmed San Francisco's warning to the Senators that Lincoln was a "ticking time bomb." Wall's auditors discovered a whole ticking arsenal, in fact, but not for two long years.

Unlike the Senators who seek campaign contributions from the likes of Keating, Wall had nothing to gain but the continued esteem of the thrift industry for his consistently low estimates of the extent of the savings and loan debacle. He is a stolid former city planner from Salt Lake City whose only extravagance seems to be his natty suits and monogrammed shirts. As the top aide to Republican Senator Jake Garn of Utah when Garn was chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, Wall became a favorite of S & L owners. Says Senator Leach of Wall's 1987 appointment: "The industry got to choose outright its regulator."